Collectively aligning with life.Organizational LeadershipOur organizations are being called to operate in more life-sustaining ways, with how an organization runs just as vital as what the service or product is.
Our challenge is that we are embedded in systems that lean most organizations toward treating people and the planet as objects of extraction, guided by mindsets that believe this it a necessary way of operating.
We are in a steep learning curve to move beyond such mindsets, practices, and systems of objectification, to grow into ways of being-and-doing together that contribute to greater wholeness—for everyone.
I have been able to learn from, lead, and experience what happens when people work together to embody such a shift towards life:
Operational and leadership models that honor collective dignity and capacity, and efficiency and effectiveness.
Financial practices, mindsets, and approaches that invite collective commitment, effort, clarity, and transparency.
Systems, structures, culture, mindsets, and motivations in alignment with on organization’s deep and worthy purpose.
Such commitment not only creates more enlivening and enjoyable places of work, but strengthens an organization’s capacity to adapt and innovate, and to contribute more meaningfully to a flourishing world.
My Story The first day of my first finance course in 1995 remains vivid in my memory. Our professor asked "What is the purpose of a corporation?" As students we shared our thoughts—from providing services to meeting needs, making products, providing employment, enhancing communities, to making the world a better place—to each response, our professor shook his head, "no."
No. No. No. It was not about any of these, he emphasized. "The sole purpose of a corporation is shareholder wealth." In that moment, I grasped a core driver of the challenges our world faces today.
This inspired me to study business through a different lens, recognizing that these skills are important to achieving the things we thought corporations were for—meeting needs, and enhancing communities—but to use them actually in service to a more flourishing world.
In 1999, I graduated magna cum laude and was chosen as the Outstanding Graduate of the Finance, Marketing, and Decision Sciences Department. ‘Sustainability’ was just beginning to emerge as an orientation and framework, with business being explicitly applied in service to environmental and social benefit.
I leapt into the sustainability movement by helping to found and quickly grow an organization, Sustainable Connections, which became the initial node for the national organization then known as BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, which is now Common Future.
It was a profound gift to witness and contribute to the swift evolution and growth of many organizations who shared this commitment to ‘local, living economies,’ learning from one another, supporting one another, cooperating and building together.
Over my career—with twelve recent years leading the Whidbey Institute, a 106 acre retreat center dedicated to transformative learning on behalf of a flourishing world—I have developed the capacity to fluidly bridge human and planetary care with the skills of finance, leadership, management, strategy, operations, team-building, marketing, and technology in for-profit and non-profit spaces.
I understand the grind, the pain, the waking up in the middle of the night with cashflow concerns. I understand the challenges of working to address systems and mindsets that are counter to life—while still being embedded in such systems, needing to ‘answer’ to them. Changing these systems is immense work, and we don’t do it alone.
We all need one another in this work—learning together, supporting, encouraging, discovering and creating together. We are, indeed, creating the path together by walking it.
Engaging business and leadership skills and approaches we have access to on behalf of efforts of working towards a more flourishing world—we alchemize this change from the inside-out, for ourselves and our organizations.